Second child’s body recovered
The body of a 3-year-old boy was recovered Sunday in the search for four children allegedly thrown from a coastal bridge by their father, authorities said.
The body was found near shore, a day after a duck hunter found the body of the boy’s infant brother about five miles west of the bridge in a marshy area, Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said.
The 3-year-old’s body was spotted near shore in Bayou La Fourche Bay, about three miles west of where the infant was found, authorities said.
Cochran said the remaining two bodies could be in the same area or shifted by current closer to the Alabama-Mississippi line. The search will resume today and is expected to concentrate on the marshes along the shore.
The search for the children – ranging in age from a few months to 3 years – began Tuesday near the mouth of Mobile Bay after prosecutors said the father, Lam Luong, confessed.
JACKSONVILLE, N.C.
Sightings reported of wanted Marine
The nationwide manhunt for a Marine wanted in the brutal slaying of a 20-year-old pregnant colleague who had accused him of rape focused Sunday on Louisiana and Texas, after he was apparently seen at a bus station.
Witnesses said they saw Marine Cpl. Cesar Armando Laurean at a Shreveport, La., station Saturday night, Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown said. The bus Laurean was riding was headed to Texas, but police don’t know if he continued on that route, he said.
Brown cautioned late Sunday that his detectives were still working to confirm the sightings, backing away from earlier assurances that the witness accounts were genuine. But he was confident Laurean would soon be in custody.
On Saturday, authorities said they recovered what they believe to be the burned remains of Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach and her unborn child from a fire pit in Laurean’s backyard, where they suspect he burned and buried her body.
BALTIMORE
NASA craft will fly by Mercury
A NASA spacecraft will fly by the planet Mercury today, the first visit to the sun’s closest neighbor since the 1970s.
The space probe Messenger will skim 124 miles above the planet’s surface, the first of three passes before it settles into orbit three years from now.
The flyby will provide up-close views and, in a few weeks, pictures.
“We’re expecting some pretty major surprises out of this,” said Faith Vilas, a Messenger scientist and director of the MMT Observatory at Mount Hopkins, Ariz.
Scientists are hoping that what they learn next week will help them begin to answer lingering questions about the planet’s origin, magnetic field, atmosphere and what that means about our own planet.